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Dickens and the Bar: Victorian Law and Literature
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Jan-Melissa Schramm |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Literature and legal discourse eyed each other warily in mid-Victorian England. The 1836 Prisoners' Counsel Act, which enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony while simultaneously silencing the accused, brought the work of barristers and authors into close and contested proximity. Both groups explored the narrative defence of violence, and this creative engagement influenced both the form and the content of literature. In this extract from her book Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology, Jan-Melissa Schramm comments on the writings of Charles Dickens who, having worked as a legal clerk and court reporter, drew liberally from his experiences to create some of the most memorable characters of English literature. And, interviewed at the July 2001 "Locating the Victorians" conference, she discusses some of the ways in which law influenced literature in the nineteenth century. |
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| Jan-Melissa Schramm speaks about her paper "Literature and Lies: Victorian Legal Rhetoric and the Demise of Sincerity", delivered at the "Locating the Victorians" conference. | |
 ritics are divided in their assessment of the quality of Dickens's legal knowledge. In the 'License of Modern Novelists' James Fitzjames Stephen spoke of his learning in rather dismissive terms; unlike the accomplishments of Scott, who was both 'a lawyer and an antiquarian', Dickens's superficial knowledge was simply that 'of an attorney's clerk' (Edinburgh Review 106 (1857), p. 128). Dickens did begin his career as a clerk in the office of Ellis and Blackmore where he served from approximately May 1827 until November 1828, before moving briefly to the firm of Charles Molloy in Lincoln's Inn. He was elevated to the staff of the Mirror of Parliament in 1831, which afforded access to some of the first Reform Bill debates; the following year, he began freelance work in the Court of Doctors' Commons and in August 1834, he became a reporter for The Morning Chronicle (Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, 1988, pp. 47-60). Holdsworth, on the other hand, has been more generous in his appraisal of Dicken's legal knowledge; 'we get in his books that account of the human side of the rules of law and their working, which is essential to the legal historian' (William Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian, 1929, p. 7). In the most authoritative study of Dickens and the administration of the criminal law, Phillip Collins has followed Holdsworth, adopting a broader definition of 'law' to include the activities of men like Dickens who worked on the margins of the legal profession (Phillip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd edn, 1962, pp. 174-76). |
Sketches by Boz
Dickens's earliest sketches, chronologically commensurate with the final stages of the Prisoners' Counsel Act debates, reveal some of the elements that were to appear regularly in his later fiction. His interests in transgression and the psychology of the criminal mind were inevitably going to bring him into conflict with the barristers who were soon to address the jury on behalf of prisoners. In the short piece entitled 'Criminal Courts', we see the professionalisation of the discourse of guilt--the 'calm indifference with which the proceedings are conducted'--and the dispassionate presentation of human tragedy: 'every trial seems a mere matter of business. There is a great deal of form, but no compassion; considerable interest, but no sympathy' (Sketches by Boz, 1837). A spectator attuned to the prisoner's plight faints and '[t]he clerk directs one of the officers of the Court to "take the woman out", and fresh business is proceeded with, as if nothing had occurred'. Dickens conceives of the law as institutionally blind to individual suffering, thus creating an imaginative space for literature's claim to the representation of more compassionate and comprehensive ideas of truth. After the publication of Oliver Twist in 1837, his apparent fascination with the brutality of capital punishment earned him a temporary place amongst the so-called 'Newgate Novelists' (notably William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who were criticised for glamourising crime and romanticising the escapades of Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard). Such texts raised important questions about the identification of authors with their criminal protagonists and this is clearly seen in the works of Thackeray who, in Vanity Fair, for example, seeks to distance himself from the moral depravity of Becky Sharpe. The representation of the criminal in fiction was a test of the limits of realism--should evil be presented in narrative, and if so, how should an author avoid the stigma of vicarious guilt? In 1842, Punch satirised the 'Literary Gentleman' and the gallows literature whose heroes quoted moral truths before cutting a throat or two; authors, it seemed, could not easily distance themselves from their protagonists. Nor could lawyers avoid the perceived contagion of their criminal clients. The most incisive comment on the identification of lawyers with their clients comes at the ending of Vanity Fair, when Becky uses her solicitors Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes (all notorious murderers whose infamy would have been well known to the Victorian readership) to obtain her insurance monies following the suspicious death of Joseph Sedley. Although these lawyers were solicitors rather than barristers, Thackeray's audience would have appreciated the complete equation of author/lawyer and criminal which this relationship implied. It is an ethically charged joke. |
But, despite the allegations of sensationalism, Dickens's interests were as much evidentiary in nature and his fear that the professional rhetoric of the law displaces personal narrative was most pronounced when he dwelt upon the plight of the prisoner condemned to death. His creativity was activated by a profound interest in the ways in which punishment excluded men from the wider community of stories; he was interested in the ultimate obliteration of evidence. For example, in 'A Visit to Newgate' which appeared in the first series of Sketches by Boz in 1836, he dwells upon the horror of the prisoners' final days; forced to occupy the condemned pew in the prison chapel and to 'hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of their own burial service', they must witness their own social dissolution by the state before their life is even extinguished. Their coerced participation in the service imparts legitimacy to the penalty which the law will exact, and Dickens expresses to perfection the authorial fascination with their plight: 'Imagine what have been the feelings of the men whom that fearful pew has enclosed, and of whom, between the gallows and the knife, no mortal remnant may now remain!' This is the quintessential point of impact between the need to record individual narratives and the desire to obliterate completely any evidence of guilt. Even the body--with its fatal injuries recording its due condemnation and punishment--is dissected and fragmented. Fagin exclaims in Oliver Twist, that 'dead men never bring awkward stories to light'; as Collins notes, this is a source of comfort to 'prigs' such as Jonathan Wild and Fagin who manipulate evidence to dispose of unreliable associates (Phillip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd edn, 1962, p. 224), but Fagin greets his own condemnation with a feeble silence which anticipates the ultimate extinction of his voice. Dickens dramatises his 'Last Night Alive' with relish; only the author can re-animate the obliterated consciousness. |
Trials and errors
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| Jan-Melissa Schramm talks about her book Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology at the "Locating the Victorians" conference. | |
Dickens's earliest narratives acknowledge the imperative nature of judicial power, whether it is exercised to silence a witness by the application of the rules of evidence, or to silence an accused by the penalty of incarceration or death. Thus, even in the Pickwick Papers--where the free transmission of stories is seen to add to a man's 'stock of experience' (ch. xiv, p. 177)--we have the injustice of hearing of the breach of promise of marriage in the case of Bardell v. Pickwick. The law of the time prevented either of the parties themselves from testifying on their own behalf; the Evidence Act of 1851, which extended the categories of competent witnesses to include parties to a civil action, was still over a decade away and thus the court had no direct access to the testimony of either Pickwick or Mrs Bardell. Their stories must be mediated by the narratives of their friends (who know very little about the matter) and more importantly, by their agents, the 'professional men' who feature so prominently in the novel. A number of critics have suggested that Bardell v. Pickwick was based on the notorious adultery trial, Norton v. Melbourne, which was heard before a Middlesex special jury in the Court of Common Pleas on 22 June 1836 (see The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1965-89, vol. 1, p. 153). The Attorney-General, John Campbell, and Sergeant Thomas Noon Talfourd (later to become a good friend of Dickens) acted as counsel for the defendant Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; Dickens reported the case for The Morning Chronicle. His lengthy report occupied over twenty-six columns of the paper on 23 June and it is interesting to read the judge's summation to the jury mediated by Dickens the reporter: The question turned upon the evidence, and upon the evidence alone, whether the jury were satisfied of the guilt of the defendant. It was perfectly clear that there was no direct evidence of the fact of adultery; it was also perfectly clear that the law did not require direct evidence of the fact, but that it merely required evidence of such circumstances as would lead by fair and just inference to it. Melbourne was found not guilty without the necessity of calling evidence, and the triumphant anti-Tory editorial of The Morning Chronicle on 24 June serves as a counter-foil for Bardell v. Pickwick where a similar trust in an English jury produces an unjust result. Lord Lyndhurst's speech in favour of the second reading of the Prisoners' Counsel Bill made the front page of The Morning Chronicle on the same day. The possibility that Dickens may have reported this parliamentary debate is undermined by his letter to John Macrone on 23 June (i.e. the day after the trial and the day of the House of Lords debate): 'I am tired to death to-night, though I have been in bed all day. Melbourne v Norton has played the devil with me'. However, after reporting a lengthy trial in which the verdict depended upon the inferences to be drawn from circumstances by skilled counsel, Dickens may well have been interested by Lord Lyndhurst's arguments that felons on trial for their lives also required counsel to assist with the arrangement and interpretation of difficult evidentiary material. |
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